Biography: My Ph.D. is in American Civilization (Brown University, 1975). From 1978 to 1980 I did post-doctoral studies in the University of Cambridge with a dining right in St. Catharine’s, and a grant from the Ford Foundation. During those years, I lectured in Budapest and in Africa for the State Department. My undergraduate and early graduate studies focused on British literature, from Milton to the Romantics and classical and Germanic mythology. I enjoyed Richard Wagner’s libretto for Der Ring Des Niebelungen and the various German dialects preserved in Wilhelm und Jacob Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen. While teaching at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Vienna, I conducted office hours in German. While studying at the Catholic University of Paris and completing the Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne, I read Charles Perrault Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye, and studied various restorations of the medieval legend, Tristan et Yseut. I am particularly interested in the nineteenth century reception of that legend, as in Tennyson, Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold, and Wagner. I have published encyclopedia articles on “Racism” in Mozart’s Zauberflöte” and “Anti-Semitism” in Wagner’s operas. I teach several areas of intellectual history, primarily American. I have published six single-author books, often featuring the philosophical idealism of two African American intellectuals, who studied in nineteenth century Europe. Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent is a biography of a neo-Platonist, who passed bachelors examinations in classical Greek in the University of Cambridge (1849-1853). I have published frequently on W. E. B. Du Bois, who studied in the University of Berlin (1892-1894), and was influenced as much by Hegel, Goethe and Wagner as by Marx. I published “Benjamin Franklin and the Gilded Age” in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (2008), and, “Du Bois, Africa and Pan-Africanism” in The Cambridge Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, (2008). I delivered a paper on “Emersonian Historicism and the Constitutional Theory of Frederick Douglass,” at a conference on The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass at Indianapolis, October 2012. My series of lectures, Thomas Jefferson and the Notion of Liberty, is scheduled for February 2013 as the Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard University. Recent Publications: Benjamin Franklin, “Prophet of the Gilded Age: Protestant Ethic and Conspicuous Consumption,” in Carla Mulford, ed., Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin. 2008. Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now (1939; Reprint Henry Lewis Gates, ed., The Works of W. E. B. Du Bois. Oxford University Press, 2007). Creative Conflict in African American Thought Cambridge University Press, 2004. Afrotopia: Roots of African-American Popular History. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
